Strange echo behaviour

[Denys Vlasenko]

On Wednesday 26 January 2011 13:21, Baruch Siach wrote:
> Hi busybox list,
> 
> I'm running the following command under strace (thanks Rob):
> 
> echo 56 > /sys/class/gpio/export
> 
> and I see the following output:
> 
> write(1, "56\n", 3)                     = -1 EBUSY (Device or resource busy)
> write(1, "5", 1)                        = 1
> 
> The first EBUSY is OK, since GPIO 56 is already requested. But the second 
> write() attempt seems strange, and leads to an unwanted outcome. GPIO 5 gets 
> exported.
> 
> Looking into the code it seems like the fflush() call at the end for 
> echo_main() is somehow responsible for this, but this is only a guess.

I would like to make it so that echo doesn't retry failed writes
(except on EINTR).

I wonder how to fix this, though. I can easily detect write error,
but how to discard buffered data in a FILE object?
Even without fflush(), libc will try to write it out at fclose()!

-- 
vda